Property Dualism and the Explanatory Gap

Property dualism rejects Cartesian substance dualism's claim that mind and body are two distinct kinds of substance, accepting instead that there is only one kind of substance — the physical brain and nervous system — while insisting that this single physical substance nonetheless gives rise to, or possesses, mental properties, especially phenomenal or qualitative properties (often called qualia), that are not themselves reducible to, or fully explicable in terms of, purely physical or functional properties. On this view, consciousness is an emergent or otherwise irreducible feature of certain complex physical systems, distinct in kind from the physical properties, such as mass, electrical activity, or chemical composition, that neuroscience directly studies, even though it depends on, and perhaps supervenes upon, those underlying physical properties without any physical property being identical to it.